Friday, August 13, 2010

Recap: My Gencon Labyrinth Lord Game

As you know I attended Gencon this year. This was my second Gencon and since I've been DMing for most of my D&D life I thought I'd try to run a game.

I created a senario last year called The Burial Crypt of the Bandit Queen running Labyrinth Lord. I played the senario twice prior to Gencon. The first group were "successful" but the game was a bloodbath. Of the 8 PCs and hirelings who entered the final battle only 3 PCs survived. You can read the details of that adventure in my previous posts. The second group timed out before we could finish the entire senario.

I tweaked the adventure only slightly by adding additional traps, one room, and changed another. These made the adventure more interesting.

The table consisted of 5 players including my buddy I grew up playing D&D with in public school. That was the first time we played together in probably 25 years. So it was special game in that regard. The rest of the group were a great bunch of guys, including the author of Saturday Night Sandbox. A couple had played together and they all had a great sense of humor. My friend and I had just come from a Reich of the Dead game with a bunch of pricks (they lost [EDIT: rules-lawyers who sucked the fun out of the game), so it was really nice just to sit back, play, and have fun with a group of guys with exactly the same gaming interests and sensibilities.

There were a couple interesting developments in this game. The first is that the party found a secret door in the first room and chose to go through it rather than head down an open hallway where there had been signs of activity. The second, was that random monsters kept cropping up: giant rats in the well room, bandits behind the party, etc.

At the chasm bridge, the party tried to send a human across until I reminded them that he couldn't see. The then unwisely decided to send Kerthanis the elven wizard with AC8 instead of the dwarf in platemail. Half-way across, poor Kerthanis was attacked by stirges and died...face-down on the rope-bridge :)

The final battle was a difficult one, The Bandit Queen was a special monster - a spell-casting ghoul - who called her 8 skeletal minions to defend her when the party entered. Again, this was a challenge, but by that time both the fighters found platemail, healing potions, and a longsword +1, +2 vs. Undead, so it's not like I was too harsh, Mhuahahaha.

The rolls just did not go the PCs way, time and time again they missed needing only one more hit to drop the Bandit Queen, and so the adventure resulted in a TPK after 2 hours. Huzzah!

5 comments:

It WAS fun! Thanks for running a great session and killing us with vigor! It was cool to have your buddy at the table coming back to the game after all those years, I hope he had fun and keeps playin'.

About Me

Greg is a boastful, hammer-wielding, red-bearded dwarf who started playing D&D in the early 1980s when hooked by the Red Box. When he's not obsessed with D&D he poses as a sleep-deprived professor of popular culture.